Yesterday, St. Patrick's Day, we got to go out for DH's birthday. We've been needing some time alone for a WHILE now and I figured this was a great excuse :-) I told his mom that time away is the best present she could give him and I had to listen to her RAMBLE on about NOTHING for around 20 minutes but it worked! We left at about 10:30 am and got home around 10:30 PM! YAY US! I thought maybe would go relax at the beach but he decided he really wanted to go into the mountains...yay foothills :-/ He said he'd always wanted to go to Moaning Caverns and after that we could go walk around Muphy's and wine taste. We got to Murphys and this was just the stream, not even the Main Street that was blocked off for St. Patricks Day...

They died the water green...it looked so lame. We couldn't even get TO Main Street! We decided to go around to the caverns but scrap the Murphy's idea.

Moaning Cavern was actually pretty cool. You have to go down 250 stairs to get to the bottom of ONE chamber and this one chamber is so big that you can fit the Statue of Liberty in there, upside down!

We tried taking some pictures but because there is no natural light in the cavern they came out all blurry. It plays tricks on your eyes.

There was a stalacmite that appeared to be only 6 feet tall but was actually 22 feet and had taken 500,000 years to form!

There was a 14 foot tall heap of crap at the bottom that bad been excavated recently and had the remains of 100 people in it, one of them was 13,000 years old! It was interstesting, but a LONG walk back up the 250 stairs.

After we were done we went to lunch at this neat Italian restaurant in Angels Camp. OH MAN, gooooooood stuff. It was a cute little family run place. The host was the dad, Mom was the cook, and the daughter and son-in-law were the waiters, and they all spoke fluent Italian too, cute.

Then we visited a few cute wineries on our way out to DH's old swimmin hole.

To get to his spot we had to drive down this VERY bumpy road up and then down this pretty big hill. Once we got to the bottom and down to the river we had to park and hike in and then down some pretty rough lookin rocks, to a girl in a skirt anyway ;-) We found a big flat rock out in the middle of the water and set out and enjoyed a bottle of wine and got some time to sit and enjoy ourselves ;-) until DH knocked his glass over and spilled it all over my camera and the Duck Hunting Paperbag Scrapbook album I made him for his present. We hung out until it got late and dark and we headed to the Snowshoe Brewing Company for dinner, our favorite place up there.

We had such a great time. It was so great to focus on each other instead of kids or the house or whatever. I think couples need that time to reconnect and see each other as a man and a woman, as a couple who love each other. If not, it's so easy to loose sight of what brought you together in the first place, the fun times, the laughing and the loving. We need that so much and I guess I have to just keep reminding myself of that and make sure we carve out that time together.

Hope you all had a good weekend - TNT!